Matt Sitomer: 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes. Worth checking out for the data visualization technique alone.

Marcus Krzastek: Can a Fake Accent Help You Sell?. CRANKY that’s a good article.

Steve Campbell: Why Groupon Said No To Google’s $6 Billion. The real reason Groupon rejected Google was fear of regulatory scrutiny and Google’s low ball breakup fee.

Sam Taggart: How To Kill a Bad Idea [5 Min Read Time]. Great piece from Jason Fried, someone who’s killed a lot of bad ideas in his day, and executed on some great ones!

Stephanie Bagley: American Idol May Allow Contestant Tweets for First Time. AI might allow the contestants to tweet throughout the process of the show where that has been completely banned before. AI is usually the top or one of the top rated shows. Will be interesting to see how the monster show uses Twitter since there is a lot of apprehension amongst competition shows about info leaking on social media. Good sign that they’re embracing social media.

Steve Campbell: Google Considers Making A Startup Incubator To Keep Employees From Leaving. When a product manager at Google told his bosses this year that he was quitting to take a job at Facebook, they offered him a large raise. When he said it was not about the money, they told him he could have a promotion, work in a different area or even start his own company inside Google. He turned down all the inducements and joined Google’s newest rival.

Sam Taggart: Yelp Introduces Checkin Offers. Makes sense for Yelp to get involved here. Expect them to do quite well!

Joe Whitmarsh: A Media False Alarm Over the T.S.A. A really interesting read about the response online and what it translated to in the real world.

Sam Taggart: The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a Great Social Product. Solid tips from the founder of Ning!

Marcus Krzastek: PepsiCo/Safeway/Foursquare Partner for an Extremely Interesting Loyalty Program. Really takes location to a logical conclusion, delivers real value to brand in the way of info while adding real value to consumers.

Matt Sitomer: Path: The Social App That’s Not Viral (By Design). I guess it takes a former Facebook exec to make a platform that is in many ways the opposite of Facebook.

Anthony Liang: Facebook Passes EBay in Value, Becoming No. 3 U.S. Web Company. Facebook only behind Amazon and Google now, how long before they are #1?

Steve Campbell: Why One VC Believes there’s more to Social Media . Social media investment funds? Sign me up.

Matt Sitomer: Is OpenTable Worth it?. Restauranteur explains the conundrum that independent restaurant owners face with regard to the popular reservation service Open Table–great for the customer, bad for the business?

Sam Taggart: Twitter’s Official Analytics Product Has Arrived. Exciting news for Twitter users and for brands!

AJ Vaynerchuk: New York Times Will Rank E-Book Best Sellers. Most interesting stat: e-book sales in the first nine months of 2010 were $304.6 million, up from $105.6 million from the same period in 2009, a nearly 190 percent increase.

Anthony Liang: One Third of Top-Grossing iPhone Apps Are Free. Interesting statistic, shows how freemium model can work and the willingness of people to pay for in-app goods.

Sam Taggart: Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing. Comprehensive guide to launching a new website. Useful information.

Sam Taggart: Ask.com ditches its search business). See ya later, Ask.com.

Anthony Liang: thingd: The Super Ambitious, Low-Profile But Red Hot Startup You’ve Never Heard Of. Really cool project, interested to see how this grows in the near future.

Dave Zhang: Amazon Now Allows You To Send Gift Cards To Friends On Facebook. Amazon announced that users now have the option of purchasing a gift card on Amazon send the personalized gift card to your Facebook friends. The card will be auto-posted on the recipient’s Facebook Wall on the actual delivery date. Great move by Amazon, as I’m sure many will follow suit shortly.

Joe Whitmarsh: Facebook introduces ‘Deals’. Some interesting launch partner deals. Will people take to checking in on Facebook once there are incentives?

Steve Campbell: Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live. The service offers an interesting way to “slash” or create specialty search engines for any topic, along with new features the company hopes will improve relevancy.

Sam Taggart: How to Take Down Facebook — Hint: It Ain’t Twitter. (aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network). Dave McClure gives his take on how to take down Facebook. An incredibly smart guy with some smart thoughts & opinions.

Matt Sitomer: Expedia on how one extra data field can cost $12M. Removing one address field resulted in an extra $12million in revenue!

AJ Vaynerchuk: The Playstation Phone. Always interesting to see a company jump into a new space.

Anthony Liang: Starbucks Stores in New York Now Accepting Mobile Payments. Starbucks making some pretty interesting moves recently, now towards mobile payments with their app + QR codes. Looking forward to trying this!

Sam Taggart: UberCab Cease & Desist Means One Thing: They’re Onto Something. As MG Siegler writes, “this cease & desist is a huge validation of what UberCab is trying to do,” change the taxi/towncar industry. The incumbents feel threatened and they’re trying to squash UC before they have a chance to do serious damage.

Marcus Krzastek: Microsoft is a Dying Consumer Brand. It’s gotten to the point where I feel bad for Microsoft, they’re getting it from all angles lately.

Sam Taggart: MySpace Relaunch Focuses on Successful Niche: Entertainment. Good job by Myspace to accept defeat vs Facebook and restructure their site to focus on a niche they know has brought them and will bring them success.

Anthony Liang: 60% of Apple’s Sales are from Products that Did Not Exist 3 Years Ago. Interesting graph of Apple’s sales of its products, crazy how much affect the iPod has had.

Marcus Krzastek: Are People Underestimating Twitter?. Some really good points here, Twitter’s info may have more value than people think.

Matt Sitomer: Starbucks Remakes its Future with an Eye on Beer and Wine. A major change in response to new competitive pressures from companies like McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts who have been trying to take away premium coffee walk-in business. Ironically, it makes Starbucks more similar to your neighborhood mom and pop coffee shop.

Anthony Liang: Microsoft Launches Office365.com. Sounds really good, microsoft is bringing it’s products to the cloud and to more products.

Sam Taggart: Google Engineer Builds Facebook Disconnect . Created by an engineer to squash his desire to delete his Facebook account, Facebook DIsconnect removes all Facebook Connect functionality from third-party sites.

Marcus Krzastek: Sesame Street’s Take on Old Spice. Sesame Street has been getting a lot of blog coverage lately, actually.

David Zhang: Twitter Crushing Facebook’s Click-Through Rate. While Facebook only averages 2.87 clicks per user, Twitter has produced an amazing average of 19.04 clicks!

Anthony Liang: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic. Really cool project by Google, surprised how little press it received until now even though they were running in the open for a while.

Sam Taggart: FanGo Lets You Avoid Long Concession Stand Lines At Sports Events And Concerts . Pretty awesome. Only a matter of time before it’s implemented in every major venue.

AJ Vaynerchuk: When It Drops – Weekly info on Movies, Music, DVD’s etc. Nifty, simple website that lets you know what is coming out this week.

Marcus Krzastek: Marketing Lessons from Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers was better at social media in 1975 than most people are now.

David Zhang: Experiment with Broccoli Ads Boost Sales. The Television Bureau of Canada ran Broccoli ads to prove that TV commercials are still a valuable marketing tool, and it worked: because of the spots, broccoli sales in Canada went up by 8%.

Neil Sarkar: Google to Start Incorporating Page Load Times in their Algorithm. They hint that the bar is set at 1.4 seconds.

Sam Taggart: AOL Will Launch A Groupon Clone. AOL enters an incredibly crowded space with this move, but will be interesting to see the kind of success they can generate given their size and popularity.

Marcus Krzastek: On-Jersey Advertising in American Sports Leagues?. Don’t think this will happen in the near future, but I wonder if it will ever happen.

Joe Whitmarsh: To Fix Bad Breath, A Gadget Seen on YouTube. After ten years of trying to get a product to market, including spending $50,000 on an informercial with no results, a funny YouTube video leads to 24 million views and one million dollars in sales of a five dollar product.

Anthony Liang: SCVNGR Teams Up with Universities to Introduce Students to Campus This Fall. Great way for SCVNGR to be introduced and for kids to learn about campus, but do enough kids have iPhones/Android devices?

Sam Taggart: View Twitter Through Other People’s Eyes With TwtRoulette. Interesting platform collaborated on by the 15-year-old creator of iTunes Instant. Would you use it?

Anthony Liang: Online Retailers to Offer Facebook Credits as Shopping Incentives. Interesting development for Facebook Credits, many possibilities for Facebook to develop this in the future!

Marcus Krzastek: Should Facebook Buy Skype?. The possibilities if this were to come to pass would be pretty monumental.

Marcus Krzastek: Twitter to Start Targetting its Promoted Tweets. With its redesign and now this, Twitter’s revenue over the next couple of years will be interesting to watch.

Marcus Krzastek: Replacing Captchas With Ads. Interesting solution by Solve Media for the Captchas that everyone hates, could end up helping everyone.

Matt Sitomer: Facebook CEO Zuckerberg to Donate $100M to Newark Schools on Oprah Winfrey Show. Newark mayor Cory Booker has been a major proponent of social media and clearly played a huge role in making this happen.

Matt Sitomer: Gillette’s Strange History with the Razor and Blade Strategy. Gillette is often credited with the so-called “razors and blades” product strategy. This article explores whether they actually used that strategy effectively.

Steph Bagley: Facebook Hopes Credits Make Dollars. Facebook is hoping to make Facebook Credits the “next great” Internet revenue generator (in the vein of Google ads) and projections show Credits could become a multi-billion dollar business.

AJ Vaynerchuk: “A Former Twitter Employees Perspective on the Direction of Twitter (6-8 min)”. Alex Payne was a top tier developer at Twitter for 3 1/2 years, this is a super interesting read.

Anthony Liang: Testing, testing…YouTube begins trial of new live streaming platform. Services like uStream / Blog.tv seem to be in danger. This looks really close to when Facebook announced Places, where the smaller services will have to strike deals with certain businesses / celebrities.

Caleb Brown: An iPad App that Stays in Sync with Your TV. This iPad app listens to 10 seconds of what you’re watching on TV and displays interactive details about the show. Very cool.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Why Twitter’s t.co is a game changer. Really interesting perspective in what will be possible down the line.

Marcus Krzastek: Meet YouTube’s Most In-Demand Stars. Valuable reading for anyone trying to understand the YouTube star landscape, also gives some nice numbers to reference.

Joe Whitmarsh: Israeli Teens Swipe Wristbands To Update Facebook Status. Interesting use of tech. Could see this at resorts and casinos or any large event.

AJ Vaynerchuk: “Realistically, Tumblr Can Easy Surpass Twitter In Overall Value”. Interesting perspective into the growth of Tumblr.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Facebook Places Propels Scvngr To 100,000 Downloads In 48 Hours. Is SCVNGR starting to become a serious contender?

Sam Taggart: From Viral Video To Billboard 100. The insane story of ‘The Bed Intruder’ song (#89 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart for the week of Aug. 20).

Joe Whitmarsh: Kentucky University Uses Facebook Places For Marketing. Clever way to reach potential undergrads. Have their friends show them all there is to do on campus.

Anthony Liang: Foursquare Takes Over Times Square. Really cool move by American Eagle.

AJ Vaynerchuk: The Truth About Real Estate Jason Fried. Interesting perspective of how to turn a cost into a profit.

Stephanie Bagley: Arcade Fire’s Experimental New Video Shows What’s Possible With Html5. Music video gamechanger. Also worth reading for how the band used social media to get their album to No.1.

Joe Whitmarsh: ESPN Teaming With YouTube For ‘Sports Center’ Stunt. ESPN to encourage viewers to upload their sports highlights to YouTube to be featured on Sportscenter.

Sam Taggart: Target To Sell Facebook Credits Gift Cards. The first time Facebook has had any presence in a retail store. Interesting stuff.

Marcus Krzastek: Scvngr’s List Of Game Mechanics. Great for its summary of what induces people to play games.

Stephanie Bagley: Foursquare Sees Record Signups In Wake Of Facebook Places Announcement. The date that Places was announced was also Foursquare’s biggest signup day ever. However, it remains to be seen if Places will “crush” Foursquare over time.

Anthony Liang: Organic Blueberries To Snoop Dogg: Branded Virtual Goods Are Booming [Report]. Sales of Snoop Dogg’s items are consistently 2.5 times higher than comparative non-branded goods + he’s generated about $200,000 in sales on the BVGs he sells across social platforms.

Kari Elam: How Kanye West’s Twitter Killed Music Magazines. Great analysis of how social media has cancelled the need for music journalist/middlemen to create artist profiles and features in an age where artists can profile themselves.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Sneak Peak At Yelp Deals. Another major brand jumps into the deals space.

Anthony Liang: Best Buy Rolls Out Shopkick’s Geo Coupon System To 257 Stores. Interesting to see if this will take off along with their custom hardware + app system to avoid cheating.

Marcus Krzastek: Ad Spending On Social Networks To Reach 3.3 Billion In 2010. As more and more ad dollars move to social, it will be interesting to see what techniques draw the greatest ROI.

Matt Sitomer: Norman Tugwater. Topical video campaign by Vitamin Water.

Sam Taggart: If I Could Do It All Over Again…. Great Q&A with one of the world’s most successful and well-known entrepreneurs, Richard Branson.

Sam Taggart: 35 Lessons In 35 Years. A fun & well-done list of insights about happiness, money, work, friendship, life skills, and more. Worth the read!

Neil Sarkar: Sharpie Re-Invents Pen With Liquid Pencil. Writes like a pen, erases like a pencil, permanent after three days

AJ Vaynerchuk: Twitter Launching Official Share Buttons. Game changer, will be interesting to see if there is added functionality, also a real dent to Tweetmeme.

Joe Whitmarsh: Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Remember. An interesting read on the logic (or lack thereof) behind organizational behavior.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Steve Nash Dives Into Venture Capital. Interesting to see the integration of star athlete and VC funding.

Anthony Liang: Groupon + Foursquare = Group Tabs, Group Deals For Check Ins. Combining 2 awesome tools, wonder if this will give both sites a burst of new users.

Anthony Liang: At&T, Verizon To Target Visa, Master Card With Smartphones. Replacing credit cards with your phone would be quite a big game changer

AJ Vaynerchuk: Twitter Rolls Out A Personalized Suggested User List. The next iteration in the suggested user list.

Stephanie Bagley: Social Networking Dominates Our Time Spent Online. We now spend and average of 22.7 % of web time on social media- big number to help sell clients on ROI of social media.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Media Companies Try Getting Social With Tumblr. Tumblr is growing at a rapid rate and could become an actual 3rd behind Twitter and Facebook.

Joe Whitmarsh: The New Clutter. An interesting take on the state of web content.

Anthony Liang: Yelp Testing “daily Deals” Feature. Yelp has so many options they can test, first check-ins now daily deals, interesting to see where they’ll go from here.

Sam Taggart: How I Became A Member Of The Ny Tech Community. Awesome post about a question we get asked a lot. Plus, Vin is a cool dude!

AJ Vaynerchuk: Hey Old Spice Haters, Sales Are Up 107%. Showing the link between social media creativity and sales.

Matt SItomer: Amazon + Facebook = A Perfect Storm Of Recommendations. Remember when Facebook changed your profile a few months ago? This is why.

Marcus Krzastek: Groupon Adds Personalized Deals. This may allow Groupon to deal some devastating blows to some of their less established competitors.

John Oates: Social Media Drives New Business. 6 powerful case studies about how social media is driving tangible results for businesses big and small.

Anthony Liang: Foursquare ‘In Talks With Google, Microsoft And Yahoo!’ About Search Partnerships. To me this would pretty much solidify 4sq’s spot as #1.

AJ Vaynerchuk: A List Of The Hottest Startups In Nyc Via Quora. Always good to know what companies are local, great, extensive list.

Brolley Genster: When Opportunity Knocks, Think Twice. What entrepreneurs can learn from NYC ‘everything delis’.

Marcus Krzastek: Unofficial Numbers On The Times Controversial Move To A Paywall. Numbers aren’t great, but they’re not horrible either. I’m excited for the official numbers, this is a big case study for the pay-wall strategy.

David Zhang: App Inventor For Android. Ever wanted to build your own app but lacked the necessary time or skills? You’re in luck as Google Labs has released the App Inventor, making it easy for anyone — programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students — to create Adroid apps.

Sam Taggart: How The Old Spice Videos Are Being Made. Great insights into one of the most innovative online campaigns we’ve seen in a while!

Marcus Krzastek: Facts Can Often Lead People To Commit More Strongly To Wrong Beliefs. A pretty scary thought, shows how better information can actually have a negative effect on people by causing them to cling more strongly to their previous beliefs.

Sam Taggart: How 16 Great Companies Picked Their Unique Names. Great look into how 16 well-known companies chose their names.

Neil Sarkar: Facebook Credits In Chinese Seven Elevens. More Facebook credits news. Bigger than the MyTown announcement.

Matt Sitomer: Chase Customers Can Now Deposit Checks Via I Phone. Mobile functionality is creeping into more and more unexpected places.

Anthony Liang: Facebook Pushes Credits Off Site Via My Town. Very interesting to see what Facebook can do with their currency.

Joe Whitmarsh: What Is @Earlybird. Late last week Twitter announced @earlybird and recently went into detail on it’s upcoming project with advertisers. Time sensitive and limited supply deals for “early bird” followers to “catch the worm”. Will be interesting to see how it performs compared to sites like Groupon.

Kari Elam: Teens Experiencing Facebook Fatigue. A great reference point to gauge demo targeting by social network, and behavioral trends among GenYers. Teens spend 80% of internet time on social networks but 1/5 of teens on FB no longer use their account.

David Zhang: Foursquare Launches Location Layers. Very big news regarding a feature that all Geo-App users have been anticipating for a while!

Marcus Krzastek: Woot.Com’s Letter To Employees Regarding Amazon Purchase. Not only hilarious, but Woot’s purchase by Amazon is kind of big news too.

AJ Vaynerchuk: R.I.P Chatroulette. Interesting look at the rise and “fall” of a webtrend.

Neil Sarkar: Youtube’s Opinion On HTML5 Video. Straight from the Youtube Blog…informed viewpoint on the state of HTML5 vs. Flash.

Matt Sitomer: Whole Foods To Feature Foursquare Window Clings. Foursquare creating smart calls-to-action in real world locations.

Marcus Krzastek: Google You Tube Game Showing Off Flash Integration Into Chrome. The game is actually really fun and done well.

Be sure to stay tuned for the next blog post highlighting some of the basics of the Text Tool. While your waiting, be sure to go back and mess around with all the things that you have learned.

7. Delete and Duplicate Selections

There are two major flaws when you cut, copy, and paste selections:

1. Once you cut a selection from a layer, the area you had selected goes away. This can be annoying when you want to cut the same selection from multiple layers.
2. When you cut or copy and then paste a selection, any blending option or layer styles you had on the layer do not carry over.

• When cutting a portion from multiple layers, you should use delete rather then the cut method. This will preserve the area you want to delete.
• When you want to copy a layer selection and retain layer styles, you can simply select the area you want to recreate and simple duplicate the layer (Cmd or Ctrl + J) and it will retain the styling you had on the source layer.

Marcus Krzastek: Risk It While You’re Young. If you keep putting off taking a risk, it never happens. Sometimes you just have to stop thinking and take the plunge.

Sam Taggart: How To Become A Millionaire In Three Years. No guarantee these lessons will bring you millions, but the post provides extremely valuable advice for entrepreneurs, and is definitely worth the read!

Marcus Krzastek: The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing. Lots of valuable stuff in here, even if just to reference.

John Oates: FarmVille Arrives On I Phone And I Pod Touch. Farmville Goes Mobile and Productivity Goes Out the Window

Marcus Krzastek: The Elevator Button Problem. What elevator buttons can teach us about UI and ourselves.

Matt Sitomer: The Starbucks Mistake: Five Ways Foursquare Advertising is Getting Less Interesting. The fact that you’re using the trendy platform doesn’t make your campaign a smart one

Neil Sarkar: 4Food Burger Chain Embraces Facebook, Twitter, Youtube. New burger joint. Order on an iPad. Name your creation and post it to Facebook/Twitter. Get 25 cents every time someone orders it.

Sam Taggart: Facebook “Like” Increases Referral Traffic to Blogs by 50% [REPORT]. With more proof, these numbers could be a big win for Facebook!

AJ Vaynerchuk: Twitter’s Next Business Model: “Promoted Trends”. Another chapter in the interesting adventure of Twitter’s business model.

Anthony Liang: Internet Is Set to Overtake Newspapers in Ad Revenue. Internet about to become second largest advertising medium, only took how long?

Marcus Krzastek: Why Tony Hsieh Sold Zappos. Sad to see that Tony was basically denied the opportunity to push the Zappos model out to other industries.

Neil Sarkar: Where People Start Their Online Day. 50%+ of people check email first thing in the morning. 11% go to Facebook.

Marcus Krzastek: A Radical A/B Test. Not just shifting a button or text but removing an entire well-used product from the site, interested to see how this turns out.

Matt Sitomer: Fox Sells 80% of Super Bowl. In a huge change from last year, Super Bowl ad sales are way ahead of schedule.

Marcus Krzastek: Never Read a Resume. Jason Fried doling out wisdom on how to find the right candidate for the job.

Sam Taggart: Hotels Test Smartphones as Room Keys. Our phones are already lot more than just phones. Imagine what they’ll be in five years.

Matt Sitomer: In Perspective: Visualizing the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Overlays the oil spill onto other geographic regions, such as New York Bay, for perspective on this environmental disaster.

Sam Taggart: Jetstar to put iPad on In-Flight Menu. Great to see an airline give curious passengers the chance to experiment with the iPad!

Neil Sarkar: Google lists top 1000 sites, Lets You Advertise on Them. Ever wonder why Google wouldn’t try to compete with Alexa? Looks like they did too.

Phil Toronto: BP (Logo Redesign Contest). This is a mock contest for the redesign of BP’s logo similar in nature to the fake BP Twitter account that has been so popular.

Saeed Jabbar: My Business Card. One of the most creative business cards I’ve seen!

Sam Taggart: Bizarre Websites On Which You Can Kill Time With Style. A collection of beautiful, fun, & creative sites that will leave you amazed!

Matt Sitomer: iPad + Velcro = LOVE. The iPad, combined with a little velcro, makes various devices obsolete.

AJ Vaynerchuk: 4 Ways to Find Out if Your Customers Use Social Media. Life, balance, money, happiness

Marcus Krzastek: Republican’s Crowdsource Website Having Some Content Issues. Just a friendly reminder that when you open the floodgates to user content, especially if you’re a controversial brand, you need to be prepared.

Marcus Krzastek: Panera Opening “Pay What You Want” Restaurants. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect a major retail chain to use this payment model, very interested to see how this goes.

Marcus Krzastek: Facebook Status Update Search. Search through people’s public updates outside of Facebook. It’s weirdly fascinating/creepy.

Sam Taggart: Beginners Guide to Using the Power of Color in Web Design. Imagine your favorite website in a different color scheme. Would it work? Interesting to think about the massive importance of color in web design.

Shaun Chapman: Harvest is hiring a UX Designer with ZERO experience. Most UX designers are computer savvy but most of their users aren’t. Harvest is hiring someone who sees their app like their users do.

David Zhang: 4 Ways to Find Out if Your Customers Use Social Media. For many companies, the conversation has shifted from “why” or “should” we do social media, to “where” and “how” social media should be done. Companies should follow, not lead, their customers across the social web!

Neil Sarkar: Diesel brings Facebook to the Fitting Room. Blows the pants off the online privacy debate.

Matt Sitomer: The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook. Graphic depiction of how Facebook has changed since 2005.

AJ Vaynerchuk: CHART OF THE DAY: Here’s How Much Tech Companies Spend On Advertising (YHOO, GOOG, AAPL, MSFT). Curious as to who spends the most?

Caleb Brown: Travelocity Says Chatroulette Marketing Works. Pretty awesome to see Chatroulette marketing actually working.

Marcus Krzastek: Android 2.2 Adds Tethering, WiFi Hotspots. Android just upped their game in a big way.

Neil Sarkar: Embeddable Tweets. “Tweets are the new quotes” — quit pasting screenshots.

Joe Whitmarsh: thx thx thx: a thank you note a day An awesome site where someone writes a ‘thank you’ note every day for all the little things in life. It’s important to be reminded every day we have so much to be thankful for.

Sam Taggart: The Life of a Startup Founder’s Significant Other. Lindsay Wiese (girlfriend of Ryan Amos, DailyBooth co-founder) writes about what it’s like to be the significant other of a Startup’s founder. Great read!

Stephanie Bagley: What Men And Women Are Doing On Facebook. Women are more active on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr while men more active on LinkedIn, Youtube. Women like to connect, men want to advance themselves..kind’ve like, well, real life.

Marcus Krzastek: Google Chrome Speed Tests (VIDEO). Awesome video showing how fast Chrome is with Rube Goldberg machines (the stuff in that OK Go video).

Marcus Krzastek: How Font Affects Decisions. Some A/B testing showing how different fonts can affect perceptions of what is being described.

Sam Taggart: What if I had bought Apple stock instead? Do you own an Apple product? This table tells you how much you would have today if you purchased stock instead of that iPod.

Marcus Krzastek: It’s Trending. Easy, simple site that allows you to follow what’s being shared on Facebook. Definitely worth monitoring to ensure nothing slips by.

Mike Boyd: The Interactive Twitter Music Chart. Here’s a creative way of ranking tweets by the user’s following to followers ratio.

There was a 5-way tie for the 5th spot, so we had an inter-office contest to decide:

Unfortunately, both Neil and Joe were pre-disposed and couldn’t participate.

Without further ado, this week’s 5th most interesting link as decided by Bocce Bottle Cap:

Matt Sitomer: Seth Godin: 8 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About Email. Because there are too many people who still fail to follow these conventions

AJ Vaynerchuk: When Social Ads Collide With Stated Interests, Awareness Goes Up. Facebook Ads have the ability to become one of the most important marketing platforms of our generation.

Joe Whitmarsh: What Twitter Annotations Mean. Excited by the cool things that will soon be possible with Twitter Annotations announced at Chirp.

Marcus Krzastek: How $5,000 bought 20 million hits. Graph showing Gizmodo’s traffic spike on Monday due to the iphone 4G story.

Adam Kopec: Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions. Augmented Reality is neat.

Saeed Jabbar: The secret to Farmville isn’t gameplay or aesthetics. What really makes Farmville tick?

AJ Vaynerchuk: Value of a ‘Fan’ on Social Media: $3.60. This could be a very good thing for VaynerMedia – might be the next step to proving non-believers that social media is worth something to their brand.

Marcus Krzastek: What if the greatest athlete in the world got serious?. I’m not sure people have still comprehended how ridiculous Usain Bolt is.

AJ Vaynerchuk: 0to255. A simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.

Marcus Krzastek: Twitter to roll out Ads. Very interested to see how this turns out.

Matt Sitomer: Has Twitter Got It Wrong? AdAdmire launches ads for followers, not tweets. A different approach to monetizing Twitter.

Joe Whitmarsh: Channel Surfing While Surfing the Net. Just starting to see statistics on Internet usage while watching tv. It’ll be interesting to see how brands react and try engage their consumers on both screens – the tv and the laptop.

Phil Toronto: The Psychological Immune System. Is it good for your health to see me coughing, sneezing and blowing my runny nose? Believe it or not, recent research suggests that the answer might be: Yes.

AJ Vaynerchuk: 5 Actions That Made Me Happier. Love these kind of things. Probably won’t implement all or any of it, but always good to read.

Keith Holjencin: Books in the age of the iPad. In honor of iPad’s release, here is a terrific piece by Craig Mod about, as he puts it, “… a conversation for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers”.

Sam Taggart: The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point Fred Wilson challenges Twitter & its developer ecosystem to build “killer apps” and “entirely new things on top of Twitter that will shape the Internet.”

Be sure to stay tuned for the next blog post highlighting some of the basics of the marquee tool. In the meantime, be sure to keep on trying out the current feature set you know.

8. Selecting Multiple Layers

Grouping layers is important in Photoshop, but you don’t want to end up with too many groups. Being able to select multiple layers on the fly is very important. You can achieve this in 2 ways:

• In the layer window, you can hold shift and select multiple layers across a span. Holding Ctrl for Windows and Cmd for Mac while clicking on a single layer will either select or deselect it within your selection.
• As mentioned earlier, holding Ctrl for Windows or Cmd for Mac while clicking on the canvas selects a layer, but you can also select or deselect multiple layers by holding the Shift Key.

Joe Whitmarsh: Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp. An interesting study on services that offer freemium models.

AJ Vaynerchuk: A Reddit Ad By The Numbers. Always interesting to see how social media platforms work for advertising (Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit)

Marcus Krzastek: Split-Test Example: Homeless Signs. An example of why split-testing is important, shows how a little creativity gets a homeless guy way more donations

David Zhang: Recycle Indoor Air 100% with Just 3 Plants. Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air.

Mike Boyd: “Poker Face” Performed On Four iPhones This is both motivational and entertaining. What can you do with your phone?

AJ Vaynerchuk: 12 Indirect Job Interview Questions and What They Really Reveal. Interview questions have always fascinated me.

Marcus Krzastek: Dutch Facebook Integrates Social Payments. Really really interested in social networks integrating easy payment systems.

Caleb Brown: Ben Folds Plays Chatroulette Live in Concert Ben Folds is amazing. When Chatroulette started to gain some hype, I actually thought about Ben Folds using it, as I’m sure many of his fans did. It just seems like a very Ben thing to do. Hilariously good stuff and an interesting use of the site.

Phil Toronto: Does This Headline Know You’re Reading It? German artificial intelligence researchers are combining JavaScript with eye-tracking hardware to create “text 2.0,” which “infers user intentions.”

Jon Troutman: 6 Easy Ways to Score the Best Deals with Social Media. As businesses capitalize on new ways to entice customers, those that capitalize on these 6 suggestions will never pay full retail price again.

David Zhang: Today I Found Out. An extremely amusing website updated daily with obscure facts and trivia. Unlike other random fact sites though, TIFO has a great design that presents their tidbits in a very easy-to-browse, manner. Definitely going to subscribe to their newsletter.

Saeed Jabbar: IE8, Safari 4, Firefox 3, iPhone Fall on Day 1 of Pwn2Own. If its man or machine-made, it will be cracked.

Matt Sitomer: Newspapers Are Still Dying – Check Out The Latest Numbers As Splinter once said, “My intuition confirms my suspicions.

Sam Taggart: Ze’s page :: zefrank.com. Not that this site is new, but if you’ve never visited, you’re missing out. Ze provides a collection of projects, videos, games, articles, and “things” that are just straight fun and interesting. Gary talks about Ze’s “The Show” all the time, as being an inspiration for getting into video blogging. Smart dude!

Colette Corrica: Physical Storage vs Digital Storage. An incredible visual representation of how much change data storage has changed over the years.

Joe Whitmarsh: YouTube Pre-Roll Ads Get Double-Digit CPMS, Homepage Banner Gets $200K to $300K Per Day. An interesting article regarding advertising against web based video. On YouTube a pre-roll ad gets $10-$15 CPM with overlays getting $8-$10 CPM. Getting $200K to $300K per day for their homepage banner must help pay for all the bandwith they provide.

Neil Sarkar: Paypal lets you pay with Bump. An obvious and interesting use of bump’s technology, licensed from the bump app… it will be interesting to see how else people start using bump’s technology.

Keith Holjencin: TPUTH. Socially Generated, Machine Filtered, Hand Polished, Electronic Newspaper for Geeks, Designers & Venture Capitalists.

Adam Kopec: Content-Aware Fill Sneak Peek. If you’ve ever used Photoshop, you’ll know why this is unreal.

John Oates: Vertu to sell 4 golden cell phones in Japan (price: $215,000 each). I mean, I am getting tired of AT&T’s service in NYC. This may be a good option.

Mike Boyd: Awesome aborted landing on a Russian carrier. This has to be one of the rarest things a person can witness!

Zak Jacoby: First Human Ever to Make contact with an Alien. What would happen to the first person who met the aliens

Stephanie Bagley: Facebook To Release A “Like” Button For the Whole Darn Internet. Facebook is reportedly rolling out a “like” button for websites to integrate to their own content, that is, in exchange for their data. Thought to be part of Facebook’s Open Graph API project.

Sameer Tanakia: Video: Computer-Controlled Bacteria Build a Miniature Pyramid. Sorry Boyd…. this has to be the rarest thing a person can witness!!!

AJ Vaynerchuk: Quora – A continually improving collection of questions and answers. Heard a lot of buzz about this during SXSW and thought it was another interesting service working in the Q&A space!

Phil Toronto: From Couch To 5k. It’s getting to be beach season and this running plan will take you from competing in the Olympics from your couch via Wii to being ready to run a 5k race in 2 months.

David Zhang: Japanese Plan Space-Based Solar Power. A solar power plant in space? Pretty awesome.

Matt Sitomer: For Old Labels, a Little Zest Have you ever purchased a product because of a recipe on the back of the label? Companies want you to.

Keith Holjencin: VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread – iPad Demo If this happens, things are going to get crazy. I’d certainly be into using a small video production team to produce a feature spread article.

Sam Taggart: Venmo. Venmo is an SMS-based payment system. Need to split a check? Owe your roommate rent money? Just hook up your bank account or credit/debit card and send them a text with the amount you owe. Also great for collecting money. What’s insanely awesome about Venmo is that it’s incredibly easy to use. All you need is a cell phone with text message capabilities and you’re good to go.

Sameer Tanakia: Official Movie Site for ‘She’s Out of My League’. Really cool social promo campaign for ‘She’s Out of My League.’

Mike Boyd: Clockwork – Office Musik (Featuring Lil Wayne). I’m happy to see someone combined The Office and classic Lil Wayne. This has brightened my week!

Caleb Brown: Qwitter! Qwitter alerts you when a twitter user stops following you, along with your last tweet before they unfollowed you.

Marcus Krzastek: Why Hollywood is Bad at Predicting the Future. I’m still waiting on a hovercraft.

Saeed Jabbar: What 200MB looked like in 1970. Provides an insightful perspective on moor’s law.

Adam Kopec: What a Logo Does Not Have to Be or Do. A wonderful analysis on logo design.

Zak Jacoby: How I Became (Mostly) Google-free in About a Day. An interesting take on how to move away from using Google services.

Joe Whitmarsh: Google and Partners Seek TV Foothold. It was just a matter of time before Google got involved in the broadcasting/TV space.

Neil Sarkar: Campbell’s Soup Alters Labels After ‘Neuromarketing’ Research. Is Campbell’s changing their iconic Chicken Noodle Soup can labels? Spoiler alert: no. But they’re changing most of the others after using interesting neurological tests in lieu of (imho) inherently flawed focus groups.

Stephanie Bagley: Levi’s Taps Mobile to Engage Trendsetting Music Fans. Fader and Levi’s have worked together at SXSW for 9 years, but this year they partnered to engage fans at SXSW (and those wishing they were at SXSW) with a new app for iphones and android that have concert schedules, streaming music and SXSW news. Powered by MobileRoadie, a cool company I met at SXSW that allows you to create custom iphone and Android apps.

John Oates: Odds of picking a perfect NCAA Tournament BracketDon’t feel bad about getting picks wrong! Look at the odds of going 100%.

Lindsay Ronga: Review Site Yelp Sued by Local Businesses. This isn’t the first time Yelp has been in trouble. It’s now being accused of skewing business ratings towards negative if they refuse to advertise. While they deny the charges, there are three separate lawsuits pending. This broaches a topic on community generated sites on how to manage ratings.

Jon Troutman: Those Facebook QR Codes Are Part Of Their Location Plans. A little more than one year after the world was introduced to GeoLocation apps, Facebook throws their hat into the ring by making it easier and more accessible to the masses to “check in.”

AJ Vaynerchuk: Foursquare and Starbucks Team Up to Offer Customer Rewards. The location base wars fascinate me. It is a true gold rush between Foursquare, Gowalla, and anyone else who jumps in soon (Facebook?)

Joe Whitmarsh: Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac. The people at Valve nail digital distribution and are bringing the incredibly popular Steam service to the Mac. Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2? Yes please.

David Zhang: Japanese Plan Space-Based Solar Power. A solar power plant in space? Pretty awesome.

Keith Holjencin: Is Google Making Us Stupid? A superb article from The Atlantic covering our dependency on computers, and great tie-in to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Matt Sitomer: What Kind of Brand Associates With Chatroulette? We knew someone would tap into the Chatroulette platform for marketing. French Connection jumped first. Will anyone follow?

John Oates: 12 iPhone Apps for Surviving Conference Season. An article that really interested me, especially with SXSW coming up.

Sam Taggart: Internet Vices. Oldie but goodie. Patrick Moberg relates various Internet & social networking sites to corresponding drugs & vices. For example, “GMail is caffeine pills. Great for a quick pick me up to stimulate productivity, but ultimately leaves you exhausted and relying on it.”

Saeed Jabbar: Why Most Programmers are Lousy. If you’ve ever experience a bad programmer, now you know why.

Zak Jacoby: NES harmonicas Hit eBay, Three Lucky Gamers Cheer. NES game + harmonica = total awesome

Phil Toronto: Hate Mail From Third Graders. I was pretty upset when scientists stopped considering Pluto a planet… but these 8-year olds provide science and drawings to argue against the decision.

Marcus Krzastek: 5 Reasons Why Old Spice’s “Smell Like a Man” Commercials Win. Because those commercial are incredible.

Adam Kopec: Design Around the World: Metro Maps. An interesting concept and wonderful showcase: a collection of subway maps from around the world.

Caleb Brown: Stickybits! This very cool site launched this week, which allows you to attach digital content to real-world objects via the product’s UPC. Very fun and a beautiful design.

Mike Boyd: Jason Alexander 80s McDonald’s Commercial. I wish commercials were still this crazy and fun.

Stephanie Bagley: SXSW: See All Austin Check-ins in One Place. Cliqset made a web app that will aggregate all check-ins from SXSW from Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter & Cliqset so you can easily find the hot spots, as well as for stalking purposes near and far!

Colette Corrica: Record Tripping. For your inner DJ.

Neil Sarkar: How I was able to Ace Exams without Studying. This guy gets it

Marcus Krzastek: Record Labels: Change or Die. Times are a-changing in the music industry, very excited to see how marketing and distribution gets handled in five years.

David Zhang: Eggwatcher: The Egg Timer that Entertains You. Creative and amusing site for those who enjoy hard-boiled eggs but have a short attention span.

AJ Vaynerchuk: A new way of working. Fascinated by different methods of work structure

Keith Holjencin: BBC Redesign Explanation. An incredible look into the thought that was put into the redesign of BBC. As a bonus, here is the PDF listing all of the guidelines to adhere to when creating any type of element in the new design.

Sam Taggart: SXSW Interactive 2010. The 2009 South by Southwest Interactive Conference was maybe the most fun I’ve had in my entire life. Ever. Seriously. Here’s the official site for SXSWi ’10 taking place next week (can’t freaking wait). If you’re headed down, take a look, there are a lot of cool resources. If not, make sure you go in 2011!

Colette Corrica: 9 Most Annoying Types of People on Facebook. We all have at least one of these as a friend. Or maybe you are one…

David Zhang: The 12 Biggest Ripoffs in America. Some of the usual suspects are on the list; hotel mini-bars, movie theater popcorn, and college textbooks… but buffets and text messages? I may need to adjust my current lifestyle.

Saeed Jabbar: Google Index to Go Real Time. Huge game changer in the SEO world!

Zak Jacoby: Adventures With Bleach. A cool way to design your own shirts.

Joe Whitmarsh: OK Go – “This Too Shall Pass” (Rube Goldberg Machine). Amazing video for OK Go’s latest single. Interesting to note that the band disputed with EMI over not allowing fans to embed the original video the label paid for. State Farm sponsored this video which has nearly 3 million views on YouTube in less than 4 days.

Marcus Krzastek: I Wonder If This Will Work. Ebert riffing about paying for content on the Internet. In other news, Ebert keeps it really real.

Matt Sitomer: The Break of the Curveball. A cool illusion that mimics the perceptual effect of a curveball on a hitter.

Mike Boyd: Pyongyang, North Korea: Hypnotizing traffic girl. It’s always interesting to see videos from North Korea, considering how private that country remains. I also wish the american crossing guards were that cool!

John Oates: Suite Arrival Delivers Toothpaste (And Other Essentials) to Your Hotel. Travelers customize Suite Arrival kits with their favorite brands of personal care items; great because we’ve all forgotten something/everything on a trip.

Caleb Brown: Ambient Umbrella Tells You If its Gonna Rain. Yes, it’s expensive but this is also the coolest umbrella that exists.

Phil Toronto: Twitter Rolling Out New Web Site To Kill TweetDeck & Other Third-Party Clients. Twitter is looking to take back the millions of people that have strayed away from the main website by using 3rd party clients. Twitter wants to control the end-user interface for when they begin rolling out their monetizing efforts.

Sameer Tanakia: 20 Unique and Creative Logo Designs Some really cool logos… thanks @goSam.

Neil Sarkar: Bing’s Virtual (Farmville) Bling Buys Facebook Fans. Moms drive the world, and I ain’t talking in minivans

Adam Kopec: Web Design Criticism: A How To. An astounding and comprehensive article on a topic not talked about often enough: how to take criticism as a web designer.

Stephanie Bagley: People watch hockey: Gold medal ratings huge for USA/Canada. Gold medal game was most watched hockey game in the US and most watched broadcast in Canadian history. Higher ratings then every World Series since 2004 and every NBA Finals game since 1998

Jon Troutman: Oscar, we have Apps worthy of an Academy Award. Oscar night is no longer about arguing with your friends whether Martin Scorsese or James Cameron deserved Best Director. Now, there are Apps that allow you to argue with other people.

AJ Vaynerchuk: “Mad Libs” Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%. Love seeing innovation in boring areas of work!

Keith Holjencin: Thinking For a Living. Thought-provoking design content. Here are some thoughts behind the redesign from Frank Chimero.

David Zhang: Quick Guide to Every Herb and Spice in your Cupboard. A quick reference guide to all the most common (and some uncommon) herbs and spices. I’ve got it bookmarked for when I eventually get around to buying herbs and spices for my cupboard.

Sam Taggart: The Science of Building Trust With Social Media. Loved this article. Was really just reinforcement for things we’re probably all aware of, but a great read for anyone doing business or growing a brand online.

Sameer Tanakia: Drop the Pun! Catchphrase Academy Even though the video is funny… what you should really take note of is the sponsor and the edgy marketing used by them.

Matt Sitomer: You’re Using Social Media. But Just Who Is Overseeing It All?. Discusses various models for social media adoption within an organization, with pros and cons.

Phil Toronto: Underground Eco Homes. I’ve been getting into architecture more and more and this is an awesome eco-friendly home built for a British soccer star.

Zak Jacoby: John Mayer Duets With 11-Year-Old Fan. A really cool story about an 11 year old fan of John Mayer who was given the chance to play in front of 25,000 people.

Marcus Krzastek: How Amazon Innovates: Lessons in Strategy for Microsoft and Others. Interesting look at why Amazon has been able to maintain a more innovative culture than Microsoft over the past decade.

Colette Corrica: Code Organ. Ever wonder what your code would sound like to music? Take a listen!

Joe Whitmarsh: Cablevision Developing Cool PC-to-TV Service. An interesting and encouraging response to consumers cutting the cord and getting rid of their tv service a forward thinking cable provider trying to be a part of the new media experience in blending all this content together on your tv in your living room.

Saeed Jabbar: How to make yourself happier in just a few seconds. The dynamics of how events shape our positive perceptions.

Caleb Brown: Tickling. I’ve been thinking about the physiology and purpose of tickling an abnormal amount recently. This was quite helpful/interesting.

Mike Boyd: Intelligent Droplet. Not only is watching this droplet complete the maze awesome, but this technology can help cancer patients!

Neil Sarkar: Facebook secures patent for news feed. I’ve never been an alarmist, and I don’t think FB is going to do anything proactive with this now. But, if in the future they were able to force all other social networks to take down news feeds, they would become even more of a monopoly and developing for their platform could potentially suck for a very long time.

Adam Kopec: Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile Than Desktop. Digital agencies should keep this in mind when building on social platforms – especially when building content that may not render on a mobile.

Stephanie Bagley: 5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From. Highlights brands using Facebook fan pages to give customers a valuable experience rather than simply a landing page. Some good advice for why all companies should have a website and a Facebook presence.

Jacquie Meehan: McMaster Carr. A great site for tools – really organized, you can find just about anything!

John Oates: Twitter Phished? It’s an Easy Mistake to Make. Because we’ve gotten an “Is this you?” message.

Enough waiting… LETS GO!

3. How it Works

We all understand that the concept of the Move tool is for moving elements (layers and groups of layers) around the workspace, however, there are 2 ways to move things; dragging the mouse and using the arrow keys.

• Dragging elements will move them exactly as your cursor moves. If you hold Shift while dragging, it can lock the movement at 45-degree intervals in any direction (I only really use this to limit horizontal or vertical movement).
• If you’re using the arrow keys, you can move elements one pixel at a time, in any direction. Holding Shift simply makes it 10 pixels at a time.

AJ Vaynerchuk: A first look at HBO GO. HBO missed an opportunity here. I hope a freemium play was at least discussed. The idea that HBO could rope consumers in to watch the first season of a show and then upsell DVD’s and or HBO’s subscriptions would be a really interesting move.

Caleb Brown: Facebook Data Team: Relationships and Happiness. Facebook visually compiled relationship state and overall happiness based on user status. Very interesting stuff.

David Zhang: 29 Semi-Productive Things to Do Online When Trying to Avoid Real Work. There are some legitimately cool tools on here that I hadn’t even heard of; Memorize Now, Ignite Show, and Bubble.us are some of my favorites.

Marcus Krzastek: Copyright Reform Act tries fixing fair use with seven words. Copyright reform is kind of a nerdy passion of mine, I like this suggestion.

Phil Toronto: 47 Amazing CSS3 Animation Demos. CSS3 offers even more power than ever before (obviously – it wouldn’t be weaker) and the capabilities are exciting. CSS3 can be used for things that only the use of JavaScript would accomplish. Cliff notes: It’s awesome.

Neil Sarkar: Video for Everybody. A sampling of what HTML5 will bring (and do to flash)…this simple code plays video natively in html which automatically degrades to quicktime if html5 not supported yet and flash if you don’t have quicktime. Anybody who’s done web development should get excited by this

Sam Taggart: RowFeeder. RowFeeder gives you the ability to track tweets in real-time using a Google spreadsheet. Really cool, and has saved us a bunch of time. Plus, the guys are super rad, great customer service!

Saeed Jabbar: Jesus arrested at Olympic Torch Relay in Vancouver after Stealing Flame. This man could have saved the olympics and the world

Matt Sitomer: My Life as H.J. Heinz: Confessions of a Real-Life Twitter Squatter. Raises some mild ethical issues, but this writer’s intentions were pure and he certainly learned a few things.

John Oates: Photoshop Prepares to Turn 20. We’re all accustomed to photoshop and it’s current capabilities. Because of this, it’s interesting to look at its beginning and the progress it has made throughout the years.

Keith Holjencin: Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation. First rule of creative innovation . . .

Joe Whitmarsh: Facebook directs more online users than Google. In 2006, Facebook introduced the News Feed as a way for users to keep up with the status updates of friends and the changes they made to their profiles. Today, Facebook has become a major way in which people share links and get information directing more traffic than Google. Such an interesting shift of traffic and how people use the Internet. Social media = the new search engine?

Mike Boyd: Printer of the Future. Here’s another interesting invention aimed at saving the Earth!

Sameer Tanakia: Steve Jobs to WSJ: Ditch “dying” Flash technology Steve Jobs has said it… now it must be true…

Zak Jacoby: School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home. A school was invading high school students privacy by spying on them through a webcam.

Stephanie Bagley: Olympics Ousts American Idol from TV Ratings Throne. AI was on a six-year path of domination in the ratings until Shaun White, Lindsey Vonn and the Olympics dethroned them by more than 10 million viewers.

Jacquie Meehan: Dolphins and Diabetes. Dolphins offering humans a clue to treating diabetes.

Colette Corrica: Inspiration Time. This is a great site to find inspiration for web design. It is neatly categorized by color, industry, elements, and style. “A directory of beautiful web design!”

Adam Kopec: Creative Online. A great resource of super-creative advertisements – definitely worth a paid subscription for all you ad junkies.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Bringing extensions to Google Chrome for Mac. Chrome has been a life-changer for me. Extensions will only improve that!

Saeed Jabbar: Say Hello To The Buzz Button. Google Didn’t Make It, So We Did. Just when you thought the retweet and facebook share icons didn’t take up enough real estate, here comes buzz.

David Zhang: What the World Eats Interesting and entertaining photographs based on the award-winning book.

Sam Taggart: How Y-Combinator Helped 172 Startups Take Off – With Paul Graham. Really fascinating and candid interview done by Andrew Warner with programmer, essayist, and founder of Y-Combinator, Paul Graham.

John Oates: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million (Confirmed). Interesting article about how/why Google bought the social search service and how it will enhance their search engine.

Marcus Krzastek: Steak: How to Turn Cheap “Choice” Steak into Gucci “Prime” Steak. Very interested to try this out. Bonus: Funny pictures/descriptions to explain.

Neil Sarkar: What ‘ThugLife’ can teach us about Twitter. The ‘savvy’ marketing types that are ‘powering’ twitter are dismissing the people that are using it the most organically. Organic beats manufactured every time, so marketers should heed the words of Sec’y William Cleary in Wedding Crashers: ‘Nature always wins’.

Colette Corrica: Card Toss Game. Fun game to play when you need a break.

Keith Holjencin: The Interview Project. Austin Lynch, son of director David Lynch, and his team come up with an amazing collection of brief video interviews from around the United States to provide a glimpse into the life of each interviewee. I recommend the Batso interview as a good start to the 91 currently available. Tell me your favorite in the comments.

Joe Whitmarsh: Onion Ring More Popular Than Justin Bieber in Latest Facebook Meme.This just might be my favorite Facebook Meme. One also wonders can this pickle get more fans than Nickelback?

Jacquie Meehan: Test-Driving Domino’s New Pie. If you liked the old Domino’s, time to say arrivederci.

Caleb Brown: Vibram Five Fingers Shoes: The Barefoot Alternative. The best Five Fingers review I’ve ever read. I’ve had my pair for just under a year and I LOVE them.

Matt Sitomer: Don’t Like Product Placement? Here’s Why it’s your Fault. This sentence: “At some point, ads and shows might blur so much that the notion of a ‘commercial break’ becomes a silly, antiquated thing of the past.”

Mike Boyd: Meteorologist freakout. I would love to live in a world where all the news was reported in this fashion, ha! I wonder what this guy does when it becomes unbearably hot outside.

Sameer Tanakia: Mosquito Getting Killed By a Laser Bad ass…. “it was built out of parts found on eBay”

Zak Jacoby: Multicolr Search Lab Flickr Set. An interesting way to search for images.

Adam Kopec: Better User Experience Using Storytelling. How user experience professionals and designers are using storytelling to create compelling experiences that build human connections.

Stephanie Bagley: Guide to the Vancouver Olympics. 1. 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games start today, who will light the torch? 2. Men’s ice hockey will be a spectacular competition. 3.Awesome events like snowboard cross, skeleton and skicross–making it’s Olympic debut!

Jon Troutman: Chocolate Hearts Make for Healthy Hearts. Even if we don’t have a special someone to spend Valentine’s Day with, we can take comfort in knowing that our massive chocolate consumption is doing some good.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Insanity.

Neil Sarkar: Hunter and Farmer Approach to ADD/ADHD. Hunter or Farmer, which one are you? They’re both equally important groups for society to function properly. This chart makes the argument that ADD drugs like adderall are suppressing “symptoms” that may actually be necessary mental configurations that increase the effectiveness of Hunter types.

David Zhang: The Most Stumbled Sites of 2009 A collection of the most popular sites in 2009, ranked by user visits through the popular link discovery extension, Stumble Upon.

Sam Taggart: State of the Internet Explained in One Giant Infographic. I’m a sucker for infographics, and this one is especially appealing to me. Explains the demographics of the Internet in 2009.

Leora Israel: Happy 6th birthday Facebook. Facebook is such a big part of our lives we forget sometimes it’s only been around for 6 years.

John Oates: Dropbox Hints At Forthcoming Android And Blackberry Apps. Access any file in your Dropbox from your Blackberry/Droid.

Zak Jacoby: Coca-Cola Goes Completely Green at Olympic. Coca-Cola will be a zero-waste, carbon-neutral sponsor at the Olympics. Hopefully other corporations will follow.

Matt Sitomer: Crying Wife. This guy’s wife tends to cry after watching movies that most of us would not cry about, such as Return of the Jedi and Back to the Future, and he films her crying. Brilliant.

Mike Boyd: New Invention: Shredded office paper becomes toilet paper.. This new invention saves 60 trees a year! I just hope everyone removes staples before inserting the paper!

Joe Whitmarsh: Control Your Email Inbox with Three Folders. Always looking for ways to be more organized and efficient here’s a great system of controlling your email.

Colette Corrica: Colorstrology. Find out what’s your birthday color!

Caleb Brown: Heinz Ketchup Packets Get a Makeover. This is going to change my life for the better, I can feel it.

Adam Kopec: Have a Glimpse at Your Sponsored Future Life. What will your life look like in the future?

Stephanie Bagley: Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs. Jurassic Park, anyone?

Saeed Jabbar: Facebook Begins Rolling Out Latest Redesign. This is the best roll out of a design facebook has done so far! I’m loving it!

Marcus Krzastek: What TV characters teach us about money. Personally, I learn all of my spending habits from MTV Cribs.

Jacquie Meehan: Xbox live. Xbox live is being discontinued for the original Xbox and games.

Keith Holjencin: The Beginning of the End for Flash?. 8 links I’ve collected that discuss the decline of Flash usage from users, Flash video alternatives, and discussion of plug-ins.

Sameer Tanakia: The Super Hero Bowl: Marvel Vs. DC Hopefully this will peak the interest of both those sports fans and…. well… non-sports fans… @Kopec.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Talking the iPad, Kids, Making Money and Video. Good take by one of my favorite bloggers, Mark Cuban.

Matt Sitomer: ‘Friendsourcing’: Search Gone Social. As if it wasn’t already important for brands to embrace social media, this pushes it over the top.

Mike Boyd: How to park in a narrow garage. Inspiring way to conserve space!

David Zhang: Top 100 Funniest One Liners on the Internet Because who doesn’t enjoy a good one liner?

Joe Whitmarsh: Google Voice Arrives on iPhone With HMTL5-Powered Web App. Google once again offers an impressive web based solution to offer functionality with Google Voice on the iPhone after Apple notoriously rejected a native app submitted by Google.

Sam Taggart: Vector Park. Spent five minute of pure amazement on this site. Well designed, fun, and interactive! Seriously, click on this link.

Stephanie Bagley: The 35 Most Ridiculous Things in Skymall. Anyone who’s been stuck on a plane for hours has perused the infamous SkyMall catalogue, but have you ever stopped to pay attention to some of the bizarre items offered in there….and realized another person made the conscious decision to produce and sell them? Personal favorites: #6 and #17.

Saeed Jabbar: Man Spying on Stripper Crashes Thru Glass Ceiling Above Her. This is the result of taking off more than Boeing!

Marcus Krzastek: Breakdancing Dog. This is how I like to imagine the inside of my head looks when I’m making a decision.

Caleb Brown: Why the iPad will win over the kindle. I know which I’d pick.

Leora Israel: The Secret to having more Twitter followers: stop talking about yourself. Interesting study of 60,000 twitter users. When they use We and You they are more likely to have larger numbers than those who use “I”.

John Oates: Find Out You Flaws with Failin.gs. Helps you answer the question “What do people think of me, really?”

Neil Sarkar: Pope Squatter. Just watch it. That’s a request, not a demand.

Zak Jacoby: A collaborative music project. It’s a cool blend of a music mash-up.

Adam Kopec: How to love the iPad. For all those bashing the iPad, take a moment to realize what it is.

Sameer Tanakia: 70% of Employers Have Rejected Applicants Over Online Info I think I got hired because of my Facebook…… maybe…. (the picture is worth 1000 words).

Keith Holjencin: Full Apologies. A powerful ad campaign against drunk driving which shows raw video apologies from people who have killed someone they cared about in a drunk driving accident.

Colette Corrica: Play Emac Games on Mac OS X. Old school games on your Mac.

Jacquie Meehan: Post Secret. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.

“It’s like shopping with a best friend. You know that other moms or other parents have tested this product and they’ve loved it, so it’s worth your dollars.”

The funniest part of the segment was when Rachael, who does not have kids, said this about the BabbaCover:

“It almost makes you want to put a baby in there…ALMOST!”

Watch the segment here:

Rachael Ray is also giving away a BabbaCover – head to http://www.rachaelrayshow.com/show/segments/view/parent-tested-products/ for a chance to win.

Even if you’re not the lucky winner, you can now buy BabbaCovers at their lowest price online at buybuyBaby, in addition to the BabbaCo website.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass. Design is how something works.

David Zhang: The Best Times to Buy Anything Even though I try to be smart and look for those out-of-season clearance sales, not every product has seasons as easily distinguishable as clothes (chocolate? gym memberships?). Enter Lifehacker’s year-round guide to “post-peak” shopping.

Zak Jacoby: Man Buried in Haiti Rubble Uses iPhone to Treat Wounds, Survive. An amazing story about a man who lived through the Hati earthquake by using his iPhone to survive.

Sam Taggart: Meeting Mix. Such a great organizational tool! Allows the user to create and manage an agenda for phone calls & in-person meetings that can be shared with attendees. I’ll be using this all the time.

Matt Sitomer: Apple in Talks to Make Bing the Default iPhone Search Engine?. Google’s hegemony might be the only thing that could unite Apple and Microsoft like this.

Adam Kopec: My Favourite Fonts of 2009. A fun collection of I Love Typography’s favorite fonts of ’09.

Joe Whitmarsh: Open Letter From OK Go, Regarding Non-Embeddable YouTube Videos. A great letter to fans on the business of the music industry. OK Go, who gained a lot of attention for their self-made music videos that they posted to YouTube, explain why they can no longer allow embeddable YouTube videos for fans to share.

Stephanie Bagley: Seesmic Look Tries to Take Twitter to Masses. Aims to make Twitter more accessible to sections of the population vastly underrepresented in the Twitterverse by creating channels on popular themes like celebrities and sports while also offering branded pages from companies like Red Bull and The Huffington Post. Seesmic is also in talks to have Look preinstalled on PCs.

Leora Israel: Take That E!: Facebook Invades the Golden Globes–The Scandalous Video!. Facebook branches out into content creation. Randi Zuckerberg and Brandee Barker were on the Golden Globes red carpet asking questions directly sent in by Facebook users.

Neil Sarkar: XKCD. I know it’s from last week but it’s so. good. If you like meta jokes.

John Oates: NBC Pulls Web Clips of Conan’s Most Expensive Bit Ever. It’s not classic Conan funny, but it’s hilarious watching him take his parting shots at NBC

Saeed Jabbar: iPod Touch : 10 Cool Productivity Apps For Offline Use. Great apps that will keep your productivity flowing offline and on.

Caleb Brown: Supercharge Your CSS with PHP Under the Hood. Dynamic CSS with the power of PHP! Neat, right?

Marcus Krzastek: Meet The New Youtube. I’m digging all the changes Youtube is making, gives the site a much needed overhaul

Sameer Tanakia: Top 8 Skyscrapers That Will Push the Limits of Design Interesting to see that the New World Trade Center is not on here.

Jacquie Meehan: Interactive. I’m always looking for new “flashy” flash sites, and this one had caught my eye.

Mike Boyd: North Pole: One week of never ending sun. A week where the sun never sets, eliminates the need for nightlights!

Keith Holjencin: Stock and Flow. Robin Sloan covers the terms stock and flow from economics, and compares them to producing lasting content (stock) and keeping a steady stream of updates (flow) to your tribe.

Bonus Link: Matt Sitomer: More CPR Players Embrace E-commerce. Direct-to-consumer sales of package goods could usher in a whole new era of digital marketing.

Gary Vaynerchuk: Jimmy Kimmel Slams Jay Leno — On Leno’s Show. Legacy is greater than currency

AJ Vaynerchuk: First-Person Tetris. Something new on something old. Pretty wild.

David Zhang: The Top 10 Common Faults in Human Thoughts An amusing post that describes all the different imperfections in our cognition – I’m a sucker for “Gambler’s Fallacy.”

Neil Sarkar: User Interface: F-shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content. People are incredibly efficient at scanning web content. Major (common) UI lesson, nobody gives a shit unless you make them.

Adam Kopec: A Negative View of White Space. An interesting discussion on the use of negative space in design!

Marcus Krzastek: I Pledge Allegiance To The Grind II Free Download. Innovative music marketing, also happens to be the best CD released in 2008.

Matt Sitomer: Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. The Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski, turned into a Shakespearean play. And done incredibly well.

Keith Holjencin: Last Day Dream : A Short Film by Chris Milk. The most incredible 42-second film you’ll ever see. It gave me the chills.

Leora Israel: $2 Million in Donations for Haiti, via Text Message. Tech Community Pulls together to Help Earthquake victims in Haiti.

Sam Taggart: “LT Style Electric Glide”. San Diego Chargers’ running back Ladanian Tomlinson proves once again that weird is good.

Caleb Brown: Illustrated Celebrity Tweets. Hilarious illustrations of celebrity tweets. The Nick Jonas one is the best thing I’ve seen in weeks.

Zak Jacoby: 12 Trends to Watch in 2010. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together their list of what they think will be important trends technology, law, and business for 2010.

Mike Boyd: Samsung shows off transparent laptop display (video). I’m excited to see how this technological advance is used. Car windshields that display your speedometer sound really cool!

Saeed Jabbar: 10 Completely Free Wireframe and Mockup Applications. If you have a flash of design inspiration, these free tools provide a great way to place it in the physical realm.

Sameer Tanakia: Google Hackers Exploited Security Hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Ok… I don’t care if you read the article… Just get rid of your Internet Explorer already…

Stephanie Bagley: Meet Darrelle Revis- The Reason The Jets Are Good. No one gets off Revis Island.

Tim Werly: How Social Media and the Web Helped Avatar Make $1 Billion. Avatar not only breaking ground in movie making technology but also in how to successfully market a movie online.

Jon Troutman: Google, Bing Gain in U.S. Search While Yahoo’s Slide Continues. Because “Do You Bing?” has a better ring to it than “Do You Yahoo?”

Kyle Bragger: Sinatra::Async Library. Allows developers to easily implement asynchronous request handling in Sinatra apps.

Gary Vaynerchuk: Facebook Gets its own Vitamin Water. Consumer brands will be doing much more of these kind of things in 2010-11 and beyond.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Review: Blippy (What are your friends buying?). I’m personally fascinated by sleep and this article shows you an interesting aspect of the world when our eyes are closed.

David Zhang: What’s Changed This Decade (1999-2009)? I love charts like this – my favorite is the Pirate Bay statistic.

Marcus Krzastek: Most Winning Creative Work Involves Consumer Participation. Some more proof that advertising communication has changed an
incredible amount in a short period of time.

Matt Sitomer: Amazing to see these beautiful, colorful subways compared to the one we ride every day.

Neil Sarkar: From Here to There: Chimp Grooming and Dunbar’s Number. Short article. Premise: Chimps cannot successfully co-exist in groups of more than 40 or 50 without splintering, and the number for humans is 150.

Sam Taggart: NBA Jam to Make a Comeback on Nintendo Wii. NBA Jam was one of my favorite games as a kid, and I can’t wait to see how Wii modernizes it.

John Oates: Top New Years Resolutions 2010. Interesting to see what people are planning to change in 2010.

Leora Israel: Vanity Fair on Twitter fame: Twembarrassing. I think it’s awesome that some of my friends are in Vanity Fair. Very proud of them. But not so happy with the way women on Twitter are portrayed in the article.

Stephanie Bagley: The 100 Most Social Brands of 2009. Interesting to see which brands made the list in 2009 when you compare them to the link included for the 2008 list. There are a lot of major shifts, especially with the “Big 4″ sports leagues all earning prominent placement on the 2009 list.

Keith Holjencin: Design Walkthrough with Khoi Vinh. Khoi Vinh explains the pros and cons of several design approaches during his creation of his new wordpress theme Basic Maths.

Sameer Tanakia: Facebook’s Top Status Updates of 2009 Very interesting to see what was on the 2009 list of commonly used terms in facebook status updates. Really guys… Lady Gaga?

Zak Jacoby: 3 Airplane Emergencies. Three different ways to portray an airplane emergency from College Humor.

Caleb Brown: Adagio Tea Roots Campaign. Adagio Tea has started to feature a different tea farmer each month. Rarely do tea drinkers have any knowledge of their farmer(s), this is a great move on Adagio’s part.

Joe Whitmarsh: For Music Lovers: Curated Set Lists for Free. Love Songza, and while I like sites like Last.fm and Pandora there is nothing like someone taking the time to put together the perfect mix.

Mike Boyd: Electronic Bike. The electronic bike is quite impressive. I hope this invention helps save the Earth!

Saeed Jabbar: I Tried Emacs (Pit Party ’08). Old but golden parody that would give any geek a good laugh.

Tim Werly: ESPN to Launch 3D Network in 2010. Get ready for Ray Lewis in your living room.

Jon Troutman: Popular Baby Names in 2009. Because Jonathan was the 69th most popular name this past year.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Enough. Neat write up on content overload.

Matt Sitomer: The Next Web – “Screw TweetDeck – Tweet by Fax”. Twitter brings families together in unexpected ways.

Adam Kopec: Browser Size. For designers: helps figured out the size of the browser viewable area!

David Zhang: 33 of the World’s Strangest Buildings. Some of the most interesting buildings I have ever seen, in high resolution photos. Worthy of a look-through!

Sam Taggart: Announcing bit.ly Pro. The URL shortener bit.ly announced a new feature, bit.ly Pro, just another reason why they will continue to win.

Keith Holjencin: Change Blindness Experiment Video. A video featuring a fascinating experiment covering change blindness. Professor Daniel J. Simons, who is involved with the study, states that this is the idea that we often miss large changes to our visual world from one view to the next.

Marcus Krzastek: Bit.ly TV. Bit.ly starting to put the information they’re collecting from their links to work by showcasing the top videos shared through the service.

Stephanie Bagley: From Blog to Book Deal, How 6 Authors Did It. Case study on six bloggers who successfully parlayed their popular blogs into book deals.

Zak Jacoby: LED Traffic Lights Don’t Melt Snow, Do Cause Accidents. An article about how the new LED energy efficient traffic lights are causing accidents.

Mike Boyd: Walking Table. This invention makes moving furniture not only easy but cutting edge!

Saeed Jabbar: A Peek At 360-Degree Video StreetView Maps. The Swiss give us a sneak peak at the next version of Google street view!

Joe Whitmarsh: Pepsi pulls out of Super Bowl advertising, ending 23-year run. Let it marinate: Pepsi, according to this article, spent $142.8 million on 10 Super Bowl ads from 1999 to 2008 is not advertising any of their products in this year’s big game but will instead turn their ad focus online…and BOOM goes the dynamite. This could be the tipping point in digital advertising.

John Oates: The Social Media Quiz. Take the social media quiz and find out how saavy/addicted you are when it comes to social platforms.

Tim Werly: Costly Kick in the Teeth to Bowl Teams. Interesting that even though college Presidents and ADs staunchly defend the football bowl system, outside the 5 BCS bowls schools are losing money by participating in bowl games.

Leora Israel: It’s OK. I Love My Old Gear, Too. This tech writer might be on to something. Something to think about this holiday season while lusting for a new Macbook. Let’s save the planet and make our old stuff work.

Neil Sarkar: Why your boss is incompetent. Does not apply to Vaynermedia (obv), but this article presents an interesting argument that people are promoted to the point that they “reach the level of their own incompetence”

Caleb Brown: Could the Google train hurt Firefox?. Look into the Google Chrome vs. Firefox battle. Very interesting as I just started using Chrome as my main browser.

Sameer Tanakia: Top 10 Superbowl Ads from 2008 Well its almost that time of the year… well next year (2010) but it is coming up soon… sooo here is a great recap from 2008

Keith Holjencin: Nokia N96 Bruce Lee Limited Edition. BONUS – A video featuring Bruce Lee playing ping-pong with nun-chucks!

The following list the top 10 things I wish I had known before I had started. The only other bit of knowledge I’d like to leave you with, before you begin your journey, is the following:

Using Photoshop is a skill that evolves and takes time; don’t get overwhelmed. There are many sources of knowledge and you are only limited by your thirst. The best approach is to just get your hands dirty.

1. User Interface

One of the most important things that users tend to overlook is optimizing their workspace. This applies to any application, program, or web tool you may use, and Photoshop is no exception. With the vast number of features available, it’s very important to make your most frequently used tools easily accessible. As you gain experience, the number of tools you’ll need readily available will grow over time, and so, too, will your environment.


In my personal experience, the most important windows are Navigator, Layers, and Character/Paragraph. Within the application frame, make sure that Tools and Options are displayed to fully utilize the potential of the tools. These features, as well as others, can be hidden or displayed using the Window menu. Once you have set up your interface, make sure to save the workspace.

2. Shortcuts

Whether you use Photoshop sparingly or routinely, keyboard shortcuts will help increase your productivity and ease of use.

The following are some workspace shortcuts to get you started on your way:

• Within the workspace, there are 3 different screen modes; Standard Screen Mode, Full Screen Mode with Menu Bar, and Full Screen Mode. The keyboard shortcut to switch between screen modes is simply ‘F,’ for both Windows and Mac. Personally I prefer the second option (Full Screen with Menu Bar), but it’s purely a matter of preference. It can also be accessed by clicking the View menu.
• Sometimes the best environment is no environment. To toggle off and on all the windows and tools, use the ‘Tab’ key, on both Windows and Mac.

7. Do It Yourself

Although Google is a great tool, doing things yourself provides critical learning experiences. There are many open source, free-for-use, elements that other designers have provided, and for time-sensitive projects, it’s completely fine to use these resources. But when time permits, I always try to recreate them with my own personal touch. The benefits of this are two-fold:

• Versatility – What if you’re using open source icons, but you need one that isn’t included? If you reproduce them yourself, you can use them for any situation.
• Learning – Figuring out how something is done takes effort, however, the experience you acquire along the way far outweigh the costs of time and stress.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Online Coupon-ing To Climb Beyond Downturn. The coupon market is an interesting one!

David Zhang: Bits of Wisdom. Creative social experiment involving a street musician at a bustling train station – something to think about.

Sam Taggart: Mashable – The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2009. I’ve always been intrigued & fascinated by what it takes for a video to “go viral.” Do you have the answer? Either way, this compilation of videos was a lot of fun to watch.

Matt Sitomer: The Next Web – My daughter on email, social networks, and mobile phones. A child’s perspective illustrates how technology shapes the way we understand the world

John Oates: VeriFone Rushes To Announce Square Competitor; Jack Dorsey Comments. It’s another great iPhone/mobile add-on. Plus this new technology could have the same kind of impact as PayPal did when it first came out

Joe Whitmarsh: 100 Best Albums of the Decade. One of my greatest passions is music and I always enjoy these ‘Best Of’ lists to look back at the past decade and check out artists and albums I might have missed or might not normally listen too. Some personal recommendations from the list: Kings of Leon ‘Only By the Night’, White Stripes ‘Elephant’ and Kanye West’s ‘Graduation’.

Leora Israel: Want a Job? Analytics is the Thing, says IBM. Unemployed? Looking for a job? Try analytics.

Caleb Brown: The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day. This study tries to estimate the amount of data we take in daily. I have always wondered this.

Marcus Krzastek: Movie Clips. It makes finding high quality movie clips super easy, excited to see it with a bigger database.

Zak Jacoby: Watt Vision – Save Money on Energy. A cool new way to keep track of how much energy you use.

Keith Holjencin: Design Explorations : Basecamp To-do lists with Due Dates. Jason Zimdars covers the challenges and design concepts for implementing to-do lists with due dates on Basecamp. This is a wonderful read involving the process of what goes into developing a deceivingly simple feature.

Stephanie Bagley: Ice Capades. Talks about the NHL’s embrace of digital media and how it is the perfect medium for the league to experience growth despite the lack of a network TV contract. The passionate and knowledgeable fan base, and now tech-savvy fan base, is fully embracing the digital access to the sport of hockey and it is showing in the numbers.

Mike Boyd: Bizarre Digital Clock. This clock makes watching time pass very exciting and creepy! Spotted via @FelixThea.

Adam Kopec: The Four Key Components of a Great Web Design. An impactful shortlist of key web design components.

Saeed Jabbar: MIT Gestural Computing Makes Multitouch Look Old Hat. Apple needs to hire these dudes to work on the tablet!

Tim Werly: Dan Wetzel’s Playoff Plan: Money Talks. Why college football continues to ignore a playoff is beyond me, especially given the money that would be involved.

Sameer Tanakia: The Year in Pictures 2009 Great slideshow of 2009 in recap.

Neil Sarkar: Understanding GIT Conceptually. Great explanation of how our favorite version control system works. FTA: “You can only really use Git if you understand how Git works. Merely memorizing which commands you should run at what times will work in the short run, but it’s only a matter of time before you get stuck or, worse, break something.”

Sameer Tanakia: Chinese Rocket Fly By BONUS LINK: I don’t know what I would do if I saw this out of my window…

Gary Vaynerchuk: Defense shuts down Bills as Jets climb back to .500. No one makes it off Revis Island!

AJ Vaynerchuk: Watch the Money. Interesting point about passion / belief driving people’s actions.

Marcus Krzastek: Who Sampled. This site serves two purposes: eliminating the frustration of determining what song a sample comes from and discovering quality songs and artists through the samples.

David Zhang: 100 Delicious Dirt Cheap Recipes for the Starving Student. Also great for those too lazy to invest a lot of time into cooking (me).

Neil Sarkar: IKEA’s brilliant Facebook campaign. Sweet and viral IKEA facebook campaign where you tag yourrself in a photo of a sofa to win it.

Matt Sitomer: John Stratton on the ‘Map’ War With AT&T. (Video) Verizon’s Chief Marketing Officer explains the rationale for the “maps” ad campaign, a great example of reactionary business.

Caleb Brown: Food Gawker. An always updating collection of images featuring gorgeously delicious homemade food and drinks along with the recipe. I’ve started to check this daily, and you should too.

Keith Holjencin: Art of the Title. Entirely dedicated to exploring title sequences of films and television shows. The video to each title sequence is provided. Here is one of my favorites.

Leora Israel: Curbing your Comments at Conferences. Conference etiquette. Are us geeks too rude?

Sam Taggart: Inside Facebook. An analysis of approximately 600,000 Facebook Pages, in order to identify usage patterns. The results are fascinating.

Joe Whitmarsh: Where’s Rob?. Improv Everywhere’s latest hijinx took place at a Knicks game. One of their “agents” pretends to get lost during the game and keeps reappearing further and further away from his section. Check out the great video and photos of fans trying to help Rob find his way back to this seat. If you’ve never heard of Improv Everywhere I highly recommend you check them out and they often have assignments here in NY to be a part of.

Mike Boyd: Snoop Dogg: the GPS industry’s secret weapon against Google. With record sales declining, the music industry has been busy looking for new ways to make money. Creative ideas like this Snoop Dog GPS Voice Skin will become more of the norm as we go into the future!

Sameer Tanakia: Design Hell You may laugh at the absurdity of this comic…. but it is true…. TRUST ME!!!!

Adam Kopec: The Difference Between Art and Design. Incredible article highlighting the differences between art and design.

Saeed Jabbar: Square Up. The entire squareup system feels revolutionary in the sense that it transitions and merges 2 different worlds. Physical tasks such as writing a check/cheque are now digitally natural and efficient.

John Oates: The Tao of Tweeting. The Tao of Tweeting. Kinda funny but pretty true.

Tim Werly: Space Elevator. I will be first in line for tickets when this is finished.

Zak Jacoby: 10 Office Gadgets That Actually Work for You. Office gifts for the holidays.

Stephanie Bagley: Fans can Tweet Teams to Victory. Innovative use of a Twitter game to build excitement around the World Cup, independent of how well Team USA actually fares in the tourney. Smart way to keep fans interested throughout all round of the Cup in South Africa even in the case of an early exit of of one’s own team.

Gary Vaynerchuk: New arrivals at Shepherds Junior School. Maybe the best feeling of my professional career.

AJ Vaynerchuk: Study Shows Memories May Be Enhanced by Sleep. I’m personally fascinated by sleep and this article shows you an interesting aspect of the world when our eyes are closed.

David Zhang: The Rings of Earth. Beautiful 3D animation showing what it would be like if Earth had Saturn’s rings – love the images of how it’d be perceived from different parts of the world. HQ it!

Sam Taggart: BCS Enters Twitter. Is the BCS a brand that should not be on Twitter?

Neil Sarkar: The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Venture Capital. Worth it for the first question “What’s your deadly sin — you don’t want to be the site that people *should* use, you want to be the site they can’t stop using”, overall these are excellent questions you’ll wish you had asked yourself after an ill-fated venture fails.

Stephanie Bagley: SoAct Wants Twitter to Identify the Users Defaming it. Social media platforms are largely ungoverned and untested in the courts, unlike traditional media. It is important to pay attention as new precedents are set, for example, when Google was sued and forced to reveal the identity of blogger Rosemary Port, who had written about model Liskula Cohen anonymously on ‘Skanks of NYC.’

John Oates: U.S. Sports to Social Media: Show me the Money!. This was a great article explaining the importance of social media in sports.

Caleb Brown: Funky Lunch. Lunch is far too boring, there is no reason to not spice it up.

Matt Sitomer: Sound Spontaneity. Thousands of hours of jazz musicians jamming, chatting, and exploring, a rare window into passion and the creative process from another era.

Leora Israel: Google OS: The End of the Hard Drive?. I want to live in a cloud. Google pwns the world

Mike Boyd: The Greatest Battle In Hip-Hop History. KRS-one (Hip Hop Legend) talks about holding a Rap Battle between 50 Cent vs. Jay-z. This will probably never happen, but it sounds like the greatest event in recent hip hop history!

Joe Whitmarsh: Embracing Lifetime Value. Seth Godin discusses an important issue of companies meeting the needs of their consumers.

Keith Holjencin: Death of a Blog Post. Explores the concept of using customized layouts on a per article basis, and references examples from several designers such as Jason Santa Maria and Gregory Wood.

Tim Werly: Behind the Scoreboard: Inequities of the free-agent ranking system. Interesting piece on baseball free agency.

Sameer Tanakia: Mock Flow: Online Wireframe Tool for Software and Websites For those that lack drawing skills and want to be able to communicate their ideas and layouts to a designer or developer. Mock Flow is a great replacement for hand drawing with a user interface that even the most computer illiterate could navigate. It can even replace PAINT for those of you who are still in the stone age…. you know who you are….

Saeed Jabbar: Typography is the Backbone of Good Web Design. Typography adds an extra touch of feeling to ones content. With the information from Brian’s post I’ve drastically improved Babbaco.

Zak Jacoby: Coke Expedition 206. An awesome social media campaign.

Marcus Krzastek: Attention Deficit Sells 28,000 copies in its First Week. No need to be locked in to major distributor marketing if they’re failing at distribution.

Adam Kopec: Offline Inspiration: How to Find it and Get the Most Out of it. This article reminds us that the best web design inspiration is found off the web, and not in web design galleries or portfolios.